Thursday, December 16, 2010

Dangle's Uneasy Assange Roundup

Like many dudes, I proclaimed Julian Assange innocent of rape because I consider him to be a hero for founding Wikileaks and taking it to the man. As soon as I heard that his accuser had CIA ties I Facebooked the article thinking that I was being really smart. I'm the kind of guy who was suspicious of Pee Wee Herman's arrest in Florida and Iraq war critic Scott Ritter's bust for internet sex crimes. Like my old buddy, Michael Moore says, never trust the official story. But now I don't know what to think. Some of the reporting said that Assange was being charged with "sex by surprise," or a "condom malfunction," both of which sound trivial, but neither are true. Some of the criticism of Michael Moore here, and here, is pretty compelling, and a lot of the articles defending Assange, including Naomi Wolf, are creepy in the way they attack the accusers as being jilted lovers, feminist bitches, or Swedish sluts. It's impossible to know what really happened. But one other thing to consider: Julian Assange looks like kind of a dick. He's probably guilty.

4 Comments:

"It's impossible to know what really happened. But one other thing to consider: Julian Assange looks like kind of a dick. He's probably guilty."

Yeah, great logic. Based on that, you and I would both be locked up for life, though preferably not in the same cell –– I've got standards, after all.

Is Julian Assange a rapist? I don't know, and neither do you or any of the other completely uniformed pundits who are handing down judgement on this case. If he is, he deserves to go to jail, though not for as long as most of the murderous war-mongers he exposed deserve to.

But you and I know that that's not the real issue here. The fact that this shitstorm erupted after the most powerful government on earth named him Pubic Enemy #1 –– well that SHOULD set off all kinds of alarms. I know that you want to be politically correct and all, but if you were the Evil Empire and wanted to discredit the biggest threat to your unfettered reign, what would YOU accuse him of?

I don't know whether Assange is innocent or guilty, but I agree with J. Peckerwood. If rationality were commonplace in political discussion, the fact that the charges came to light when they did would have been an additional embarrassment to the US government as everyone expressed suspicion about the coincidence. And of course, whatever Assange did or did not do in Sweden has rather less bearing on the significance of the documents Wikileaks made public than anything Nixon's plumbers might have found in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's files would have had on the significance of the Pentagon Papers.